Principles of western civilisation

56 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

characteristic development we have been endeavouring to describe. We see the centre of gravity in the evolutionary hypothesis in process of being definitely shifted out of the present into the future. We see the Darwinian principle of Natural Selection being accepted with increasing certainty as the ruling principle throughout the processes of life. But we see it no longer regarded as related in all its meaning to the interests of individuals, “red in tooth and claw with ravine,’ in a contemporary struggle for existence in the immediate foreground, which filled the imagination of the early Darwinians.

It is not necessary to enter here upon the technicalities of the wide issues which have been raised by the further group of theories enunciated by Professor Weismann under such titles as the Continuity of the Germ-Plasm, the Non-Inheritance of Acquired Qualities, the Significance of Sexual Reproduction in the theory of Natural Selection, and Retrogressive Development; nor upon the merits of the many controversies that have been waged round them. Our concern here is with the fact which now stands in the background behind all the controversies to which these theories have given rise, namely, the new and larger conception of the method of the operation of the principle of Natural Selection in the evolutionary process. The distinctive feature of the change is the relegation toa secondary place of the interests of the individual and the present, and the emergence into sight of causes associated with the interests of the future and the universal, through the medium of which Natural Selection, entirely subordinating the former to the latter, dominates the evolutionary process